The First (1/1)
Title - The First (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - Through S2
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - The past shows up at the most unexpected times. And in unexpectedly concrete ways.
Author's Notes - lorelaisquared won a number of incentive words from bidding on the last Support Stacie auction. She donated them to gioiamia , who requested this fic, although she didn't know it, because it was a surprise. She has graciously agreed to share with all of you!
Because it's short, it's unbeta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
There were so many Time Lords in his head now. Odd, to think of having that problem again, when he had thought for so long that he never would. But his kids were noisy and loud in there, utter chaos all the time, and they hadn’t quite figured out yet how to quiet down. And the last time he had gone to North Vyrlis had been so very long ago. Who could be expected to remember every place they’d visited in nine centuries? Not even the most brilliant mind in the universe (which he was) could remember all of that. And that was how it happened.
What was even more amusing to him about the whole thing was that it wasn’t even the kids that made the first mistake. It wasn’t like the time Brem had wandered off on the asteroid bazaar and gotten himself tangled up with the previous Doctor with the leather jacket. No, no, this one was all him. Welllll, maybe the kids shared a bit of the blame, simply by virtue of having distracted him with a debate about whether or not they ought to be allowed to add some hummingbirds to the TARDIS garden, and he was carrying Fortuna, perched on his hip and trying to win him over to her stance in the argument based on the prettiness of the birds, and he was distracted.
He’d turned his head to look at his daughter, blonde hair escaping its pink ribbon, earnest as she explained to him that the hummingbirds would flit, and didn’t he approve of flitting?
“I’ve never really given a thought to flitting before,” he told her, “but I think that they would-“ He was so intent on the conversation with Fortuna that he collided into somebody in the busy marketplace. “So sorry,” he said, automatically, turning back to pay attention to whoever he’d bumped into, putting a hand out to steady her. The woman would have been a completely unremarkable woman, thoroughly uninteresting, except for the fact that she wasn’t, and the shock of seeing her was so complete that he said, without thinking, “Susan.”
She stared at him. “How do you know my name?”
He felt frozen into place as he looked at her. Susan. Susan, who had blinked out of existence with everyone else, but somehow he had managed to cross an echo of a timeline, here on North Vyrlis, one of those random pockets of time that could sometimes bleed through. In a second, he thought, he would turn, or blink, and the timeline would right itself, but for now, just that moment, Susan was there, and suddenly he remembered, everything in his life that had preceded the life he currently led, in a way that he hadn’t in a very long time.
He acted on impulse, knowing it was a terribly unwise thing to do but unsure how long the time would keep bleeding through, and hugged her closely. “Susan,” he said again, the words he had never gotten an opportunity to tell her, because in the closing days of the Time War the one thing that nobody had had enough of was time for good-byes like this. “I’m so sorry.”
She pushed him away after a second, and she did not ask who he was. The look in her eyes was fearful enough that he thought she was on the right track anyway.
“Daddy-“ Fortuna began, confused by what was going on, but then he interjected, “Susan.”
Well, not him. The old him, who was also the younger him, yet looked like the older him, coming over to Susan and looking ready to scold her, probably for wandering off, but he paused as he caught sight of him, and the Doctor felt that press against the back of his head, that heavy feeling you got only when conversing with another version of yourself, the weight of the time handling the paradox. They gazed at each other for a very long moment. The psychic link would not work through the bleed, but you seldom needed such things with another version of you: you just knew.
He watched the younger/older him’s eyes flicker to Fortuna in his arms, and, unexpectedly, smile. “Really?” he said. “You must be very old, to have decided it was worth the effort to start all over again.”
“I…” The Doctor trailed off. There was too much to explain, about the life he currently led, most of which he couldn’t even safely tell his younger self about, anyway. So he did the only thing he could think of to do. “This is Fortuna. Say hello, Fortuna.”
His kids were used to being introduced to strangers. “Hello,” she said, obediently.
The other two kids, sensing that possibly something of interest was happening, had stopped fawning over the hummingbirds and clustered around him, staring at the strangers. “And Brem,” he heard himself saying. “And Athena. Say hello,” he told them. “It’s…an old friend of mine.”
“Hello,” they chorused, studying the younger version of him critically, and he wondered what they were thinking.
“And Susan,” he added.
“Hello,” they said again.
“Where’s your mother?” the Doctor asked them, and he wondered why it mattered. Why? Why introduce everyone? Except that it seemed that he should. It seemed suddenly like this was the closest his family would get, to meeting the first nine hundred years of his life. He glanced over his shoulder, at where Rose was still frowning over the hummingbirds, clearly trying to make a decision. “Rose!” he called.
She looked up, and then walked over to them.
“This is Rose,” he said.
Curious, she looked from him to Susan and his younger self. His younger self reached out and took her hand and kissed it very elegantly. “Charmed,” he said.
“Thank you,” she responded.
He looked at him, his eyes twinkling. “My, how things turn out. One would never predict, would one?”
“You have no idea,” the Doctor told him, fervently.
“I fear we haven’t long. To days to come,” he said, with a small inclination of his head.
“Very good days,” he said. “I really do promise.” He knew he wouldn’t remember it, but still, maybe something would seep through, some subconscious comfort that it would all be alright-better than alright-eventually. “All my love to long ago,” he finished.
His younger self nodded in acknowledgment, smiled at the children, flickered out of existence, Susan by his side.
“Where’d they go?” Brem asked, immediately.
“Home,” said the Doctor. “They’re not of this time, they were bleeding through.”
“What’s that mean?”
The Doctor couldn’t decide if he was happy that the explanation of time-bleeds closed the topic of the hummingbirds.
None of them discussed the meeting on North Vyrlis for several Earth days, and he thought they’d forgotten all about it, until Rose said, off-handedly, one night while he was helping clear the table after dinner and the kids were theoretically getting ready for a bit of sleep but realistically doing anything but, he was sure, “That was you, wasn’t it?”
“What?” he asked, confused.
“On North Virlys the other day. It was you.”
“Yes,” he admitted, after a second, concentrating on the dishes.
“How many yous ago was it?”
“Many, many, many,” he said. “It was actually my first body, getting very close to the end of its time.”
“I didn’t realize that you aged, you know.”
“I do. Just very slowly.”
“Who was the girl? A companion?”
“No.” He rinsed extremely carefully. “My granddaughter, actually.”
Rose was silent for a second. He didn’t look at her. “Was it?” she said, finally.
“Yes. A granddaughter I rescued from Gallifrey. Because she reminded me of me, and I wanted to show her the universe the way I knew it, not the way they would have told it to her.”
“And you did,” said Rose.
“I did. For a little while.”
“What happened to her?”
He smiled in recollection. “She fell in love, with a lovely man, got married, settled down, here on Earth, twenty-second century. They were very happy, I think.”
There was another moment of silence, then Rose pressed the point, which he’d known she would. “And then what happened to her?”
He didn’t answer, stacked dishes in the dishwasher. Rose reached out and squeezed his hand.
“I’m glad you got to see her again,” she said.
He squeezed her hand in return, and moved onto the next dish. They worked in companionable silence for a while. Then he ventured, “How’d you know it was me?”
She startled him by suddenly turning him and kissing him, hard, until he was breathless and slightly dizzy when she pulled back the merest breath of space. “Oh, my love,” she whispered. “I will recognize you always.”